"Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright —
all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep
your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright."
(http://creativecommons.org/about/)
"Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world
in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm.
At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable
to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation
and protection equally — have become endangered species.
Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain
uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary
and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses
of them — to declare “some rights reserved.” (http://creativecommons.org/about/)
RE: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
"This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works
and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or
use them commercially." (
http://creativecommons.org/about/license/)
Much of the philosophical underpinning of this movement is owed to Professor Lawrence Lessig, who in his book "Free Culture:
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity", writes the following: "That tradition
is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of “free culture”—not
“free” as in “free beer” (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement 2), but
“free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,”
“free will,” and “free elections.” A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It
does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights,
to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture
is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free
culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of
the powerful, or of creators from the past.
Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a
free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the
state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism
in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today."
